A team based out of the Cambridge Innovation Center came down to New York last week and snagged a bit of starting cash at the Santander InnoVentures Distributed Ledger Challenge fintech pitch competition.

CEO Matthew Commons said his startup,Cambridge Blockchain, is an identity management platform for blockchain systems (the public ledgers for the Bitcoin network.) Blockchains are tools that provide trust, he said, in cryptocurrency transactions—which are anonymous by design. “This is one of the most critical areas where blockchain technology needs to improve if it’s going to get out of the lab and into real enterprise systems,” Commons said.

Cambridge Blockchain came up with a way to verify certain attributes of the participants in cryptocurrency transactions without revealing their full identities. Documents that serve as proof of identity are kept in a virtual container with details that can be released among the parties in trading transactions. How much information is shared, such as their credit rating and which country they live in, is determined by the respective users.